Last year Tabitha Gnanaharan studied at Presbyterian Ladies College. This year, by her choice and initially against her parents' wishes, she moved to Glen Waverley Secondary College.

A recent arrival in Victoria, she had talked to young people at Crossways Baptist in Burwood East. They said that if you cared about science and information technology, as she did, Glen Waverley was the school to go to.

The 14-year-old's story is typical of changes that are turning Glen Waverley - school and suburb - into a prized Melbourne locale. In local newspapers, real estate advertisements tout houses as being close to the high school. Of the 70 or so people who make house inquiries to Glen Waverley real estate agents Ray White each week, 45 to 50 ask whether the house is close to the school, says senior sales executive Jan Anstey.

In last year's VCE results, one in five year 12 students at Glen Waverley got study scores above 40, a performance better than Wesley College and better than any state secondary school bar Melbourne High, Balwyn and MacRobertson Girls. Nineteen students got ENTER scores above 99; 80 per cent of all year 12 students went on to university.

And so median house prices soar - from $150,000 in 1994 to more than twice that today - and school numbers swell. Although it's meant to take only 1600 students, by law, the school must take anyone in the zone. To meet the demand, it staggers the school day: year 12 students start just after 8am. "There has been a lot of angst in the community, especially from people trying to get in who live on the margins of the zone," says principal Darrell Fraser.");document.write("

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He says he sometimes gets 20 to 30 inquiries a day from parents asking what they have to do to get their children in.

Many are new Asian migrants: about 35 per cent of students at Glen Waverley are ethnic Chinese, 10 per cent Indian or Sri Lankan. "Their culture places such a high value on education," says Mr Fraser. "Many of these students see coming here as an opportunity not to be wasted."

Linda Huang, for example, arrived at the school in 1997, having migrated a few years ago from China without a word of English. Last year she got a perfect score of 100 for VCE English.

Migrants are transforming Glen Waverley in other ways, too. Talk to the locals and they start counting all the new Chinese and Indian restaurants, then run out of fingers and give up. There's a Sikh hockey club in Mount Waverley, a Buddhist funeral parlour and a drop-in centre for recently arrived Indian women. The local McDonald's sells tandoori burgers and curry puffs. Glen Waverley, says Indian-born writer and local resident Keith Butler, is turning saffron.

The City of Monash (Waverley and Oakleigh) has 5 per cent of Melbourne's population but in the five years to last June it took 11 per cent of 8000 new arrivals from China, and 10 per cent of 6500 arrivals from India and Sri Lanka.

Monash University's Bob Birrell sees the transformation of this belt of middle Melbourne as a remarkable migration success story, because the migrants, often well-educated and well off, have slipped seamlessly into the suburbs.

Not all migrants have come so far: Ann and Ted Sztefek came from Burwood. "We used to think the world ended at Warrigal Road," Ann says. But their two children's names were down for Wesley's Glen Waverley campus, so, three years ago, "rather than buy into Camberwell and put this massive mortgage around our necks, we downscaled our house to send our kids to a private school". Some scale down: the family swapped a Californian bungalow for a two-storey house backing on to Waverley's Jells Park.

The changes are easy to miss if you're driving through: Glen Waverley's streets are deserted; life happens behind the door. But signs of affluence are everywhere. Wesley and Caulfield Grammar have local campuses; Haileybury does letterbox drops in the area and private buses ferry its Waverley students to its Keysborough campus. The Century City Walk complex has 10 cinemas and a Novotel. David Jones opened at the Glen in 1996. There's a new aquatic centre, a giant gleaming fishbowl, on Waverley Road.

The key to it all is the abundance of jobs. BMW, Nestle, Toshiba, Ansell and adidas all have their Australian headquarters in the area. NEC moved to Glen Waverley in 1998, 3M last year.

And the locals are profiting. NEC estimates that 85 per cent of 900-plus employees working in Waverley and at its Mulgrave site live in the east and south-east region. In a thesis published last year, Monash University's Anne Barlow showed that the idea of Waverley as a commuter suburb for CBD workers was false. While only 13 per cent of Waverley workers lived in the suburb in 1961, by 1996 that figure had climbed to nearly 30 per cent.

"Waverley pumps these days," says Monash Mayor Geoff Lake. That's an unusual phrase for a mayor but then Lake is 22. He is an arts-economics student, a former captain of the high school and a Glen Waverley resident nearly all his life.

Although Monash has an ageing population overall, Mr Lake says it also has the second largest population of 10 to 25-year-olds of any Victorian municipality. The other night a group of young people bailed him up in the Wheelers Hill hotel and demanded more facilities for young people, such as a pinball parlour or a pool hall. Mr Lake said he'd see what he could do.

Often you'll find Mr Lake, and many other young people, at Mocha Joe's in the Glen. It's a popular late-night coffee shop run by another immigrant, from East St Kilda. Christopher Christo, who came here in 1999 with his partner, Lisa Niko, says his cafe is to Glen Waverley what Cafe Sienna is to Chapel Street. Right or wrong, it's another sign of change. The city, he says, "is coming to the suburbs".